Could the Prawn Diet Save France?

This week, the European press has been feeding on a new book from the diet guru Docteur Pierre Dukan, he who supposedly had Carole Middleton, in the run-up to the royal wedding, subsisting on naught but prawns and cottage cheese. (“Every morning I say thank you for the Middleton,” Dukan, who claims that twenty-eight million people have taken up his Jack Sprat-ish regimen, told the Financial Times.)

The book, “An Open Letter to the Future President,” argues that obesity is a political issue. Dukan suggests, for instance, that his regimen (basically a modified Atkins diet, commencing with an “attack phase” in which one can eat only protein and oat bran) could help rescue the French economy. He told Le Parisien (my and Google Translate’s translation), “With my method, many products saw sales explode! The Carres Frais 0%”—a kind of fat-free, pre-packaged cow’s-milk cheese—“imitation crab meat, smoked salmon, cans of tuna, ham, oat bran, etc…. There is a future market that could generate a lot of wealth for our country and bail out France. Through a national call for proposals, the future president could lead industry to take this path. In addition, France, known worldwide for its beautiful, thin women could export its expertise overseas.”

Most controversially, Dukan is calling for French high-school students to receive higher marks on their baccalaureate exams if they maintain desirable body-mass indexes. Even in France, this has struck many as an overly punitive grading policy. As the Telegraph reported, the French ministry of health said that it was “astonished at Dr. Dukan’s strange proposal.” Anne-Sophie Joly, the president of le Collectif National des Associations d’Obèses, said, “One can already hear playground taunts like, ‘Fatso, you’ll never get your bac.’”

Lauren Collins began working at The New Yorker in 2003 and became a staff writer in 2008.